Free The Iceman: The Rise and Fall of a Crime Lord by Jim Wilson

Times newspaper cast a light on the family’s rapidly expanding drugs empire in August 1998, referring to them only as the mysterious ‘M Family’. The article told how two unnamed brothers (Tony and Tommy) had clashed following a bitter fall-out. The newspaper predicted bloodshed but it omitted to mention one non-family member who would be central to the murderous drama that was to unfold in the months ahead.
    While the McGovern name was now being talked about by police, reporters, nightclub crowds and amongst the Glasgow underworld, Stevenson was staying firmly in the shadows. The teenage wide boy with the big mouth had grown up and had learned the value of keeping quiet.

12
    Best Men
     
    The senior policeman in charge of the Friday afternoon operation did not find the joke funny. He led a small surveillance unit whose job on 31 July 1992 was to discreetly monitor the wedding and reception of drug dealer Tony McGovern. The officer’s blood pressure began to rise when some in the team half-jokingly suggested getting closer to the action by joining the wedding party for a pint in the hotel’s public bar. That idea was firmly rejected.
    McGovern, then aged twenty-seven, was to marry Jackie Craig, a publican’s daughter, who was one year younger than her husband-to-be. To an outsider, it was a romantic but otherwise unremarkable exchanging of vows between a groom, who described himself as a ‘recovery vehicle driver’ on his wedding certificate, and his shop-assistant bride.
    The ceremony at St Aloysius Church in Springburn was conducted by Father Noel Murray – the priest would also perform the groom’s funeral service eight years later. Best man on that summer’s day was Tony’s closest pal and business partner, Jamie Stevenson. They were as close as brothers. Also witnessing the exchanging of vows was Tony’s sister Jackie who was, by then, the wife of Russell Stirton.
    After the happy couple tied the knot, the wedding party crossed the River Clyde to a hotel in Shawlands on the southside of Glasgow for the reception. The choice of this rather modest venue was all about Tony being smart enough to keep it discreet. By now, his prominence in the city’s drugs trade was enough to merit the police surveillance operation. The team from Strathclyde Police’s Pitt Street headquarters created their own album of wedding snaps although they were never to be seen by the happy couple.
    This was the police’s chance to see who Tony was friendly with and, just as tellingly, which criminals had not received an invitation through the post. Car registrations were clocked, names noted and faces photographed – all scraps to be stored away for future reference in the intelligence files.
    Six years later, on a Saturday in August 1998, it was Stevenson’s turn to leave single life behind. Tony McGovern was the obvious and only choice to reciprocate the best-man duties for the ceremony at King’s Park Church in the southside of Glasgow.
    Stevenson’s mother was not there to see her only son getting married, having died just a few months earlier at the age of fifty-four. Stevenson, then aged thirty-three, was to marry Caroline Adam, who was just four days away from turning forty. Their wedding certificate has both of their occupations down as ‘ice-cream van salesperson.’
    The couple had recently moved into a comfortable detached home in the Glasgow commuter town of East Kilbride. Up until that point, Stevenson had lived in a flat in Aberfoyle Street, in the Dennistoun area of Glasgow’s east end.
    One guest at the 1998 wedding was New York construction firm owner Anthony Sarcona, whose wife, a relative of Caroline, moved to the US at the age of twelve. He has only just learned about the groom’s more recent drug-smuggling activities. Anthony said:
    This is a big surprise to me. As far as I knew it was just a regular wedding. I talked to Jamie when I was there. He wasn’t a big guy or anything like that. In fact, he was